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From start(er) to finish!

From start(er) to finish!

Well I finally got around to baking this weekend. My starter was 2 weeks old last Friday and bubbling and growing faster than I can feed it or use it!

I produced this loaf loosely based on the The Quest for San Francisco Sourdough, take 4 blog of dmsnyder. Primarily due to disorganization and distraction my fermentation times are all over the place, but seems it still produced a great tasting loaf and while I'm sure I'm biased, it's also kinda pretty. My starter is maintained at 100% and my levain fermented at room temp, about 65 in my house this time of year, for 21 hours. I dropped my autolyse time to 1 hour, I can't for the life of me remember why...maybe due to the dinner guests I had coming that night and realizing I had to get pizza dough rolling. I did follow the 4 hour room temp ferment time with s&f at 50 and 100 minutes. I pre-shaped into what was supposed to be a batard but more resembled an hour glass, I've got some work to do there, and proofed 2 hours at rm temp. My cold retard time was 17 hours, then just proofed 1 hour at room temp, (if there was anyplace that's 85 degrees within 500 miles of me right now I would have driven there to do that final proof) for an hour before baking. I used steam the first 10 minutes and baked until 208 degrees.

Think it was slightly over proofed based on my poke test and I've got lots of scoring practice ahead of me, but not a bad first go.

bread around, if you discount David's Pugliesi and his San Joaquin :-) You have done a fine job with it for a first attempt. I believe the first bake I did with one of his breads and maybe my first post on TFl we managed to set off the smoke detectors with an oven than was very dirty and hadn't been over 350 F in a long time and nearly set the house on fire when the oven lit up unexpectedly:-) David said my bake proved his recipe was bullet proof when the bread turned out better than OK. I say his recipe was idiot proof!

You did a much better job with his fine formula, Well done and happy baking

I too have a smoke detector issue. Every time I would dial it up to 425 or higher, everyone in the house would stand under a detector and fan until they stopped screeching. I discovered if I turn the ceiling fans in the guest room and my office on high before baking, it seems to eliminate that rather annoying part of the process.

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